Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  When he announced his betrothal to the daughter of the Emperor of Russia, Victoria’s response was to say, ‘The murder is out!’13 She felt ‘painfully’14 the fact that the Romanovs were not Protestants. ‘It is the first departure since 200 years nearly from the practice of our family since the Revolution of ’88!’ Vicky tried to reassure her mother that ‘the Greeks’ – that is, the Russian Orthodox – ‘are very much more harmless than Catholics’. Victoria was able to extract some comfort from this, and when ignorant backbenchers in the House of Commons wondered whether English royalties could marry Russian Orthodox without infringing the Royal Marriages Act, she asked Mr Gladstone to make it clear to them that ‘a marriage with a princess of the Greek faith is strictly within the Law and will in no way affect the succession to the Crown’.15 Privately,16 Victoria worried that Affie would ‘be ready to be quite a humble servant of Russia’. For these were interesting times for an Anglo-Russian alliance. All Victoria’s instincts, and all Disraeli’s, were anti-Russian in the international diplomatic game. Even as Affie began his life with Maria Alexandrovna, British and Russian diplomats were entering a phase of mutual suspicion over the so-called Eastern Question.

  The wedding was fixed for 23 January 1874 – in the Queen’s opinion crashingly tactless of the Russian Royal Family, who could surely have remembered that it was the anniversary of the death of her father, the Duke of Kent, at Woolbrook Cottage in Sidmouth in 1821. The full ceremonies of the Orthodox Church were performed in the Imperial Chapel of the Winter Palace at St Petersburg, the blind Metropolitan of Moscow, Innocent, being led around in his brocaded cope by bearded acolytes. Affie and Marie, attended by three of her brothers and young Arthur, Duke of Connaught, processed round the altar carrying lighted tapers. After this, the pair were led out to the Salle d’Alexandre, a drawing room in the Winter Palace, where Dean Stanley read the reassuring words of the marriage service from the English Prayer Book. The bride carried a bouquet of white myrtle, sent by Queen Victoria from Osborne. Alix was there, and Vicky had come from Berlin. A few days later, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the royal parties travelled to Moscow, where a solemn Te Deum was sung in the Kremlin, and the Imperial Family moved in procession, kissing icons as they went.

  It all made an exotic change from the simplicities of divine worship at Crathie and Whippingham. No doubt Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, with his expert knowledge of the monasteries of the Levant – consolidated while on tour with Bertie in 1861 – viewed the ceremonial with the interested eye of an anthropologist, even though both he and his wife, Lady Augusta, who accompanied him, must have been aware how such clanking of censers, such bowings before sacred art, such chants and such repetitions, would have disgusted their royal mistress and her faithful Calvinist Highland servant.

  Indeed, in that January of 1874, in very wet weather, the Archbishop of Canterbury went down to Osborne to conduct the confirmation of the youngest of the Queen’s daughters, Princess Beatrice (Baby). The service took place in Whippingham Parish Church, which had been ‘very prettily decorated with flowers’,17 for the occasion. Archibald Campbell Tait had been the archbishop for five years. An Arnoldian theological liberal, he was precisely the sort of man Prince Albert would have approved as archbishop – a former headmaster of Rugby (Lewis Carroll was a pupil), before that a fellow of Balliol, a Broad Churchman with a social conscience. As Bishop of London, he had preached to the postmen at Mount Pleasant, and he had insisted on free places for the poor being assigned at Westminster Abbey. (Before Tait’s reform, one had to pay to attend divine service there.) In 1856, five of his seven children, daughters between the ages of two and ten, died of scarlet fever. (His brother, during childhood, had died of the same illness.18)

  He looked like a man who had been battered by life – a huge, fleshy face, pitted with lines and scarred with grief. He was not close to the Queen, although she had been fascinatedly appalled by the scale of his family loss – as had everyone who heard of it. On the Isle of Wight, the Queen decreed his confirmation sermon to be ‘admirable’.

  Tait had inevitable feelings of nervousness when he visited the island for the ceremony. He was not by nature a courtier. He thought the princess looked ‘very sweet’.19 He dined at Osborne House, and it was apparently the first time since the death of Prince Albert that the Queen went to the drawing room after dinner. The archbishop was taken aback to discover that the family spoke German to one another. One prince said to him, as they stood back to watch the Queen’s arrival in the drawing room, ‘Das ist viel besser!’20 (‘That is much better!’)

  The Queen told Tait that she wanted to have a long talk with him about the state of the Church, and this happened the next day, in the same drawing room. ‘She talked long and very earnestly about the state of the Church urging that something vigorous should be done to preserve its Protestant character . . . She urged that the Bishops ought to have more power given to them by legislation.’21

  To Dean Stanley, who had been a boy at the same Rugby School of which Tait would become headmaster, the Queen had expressed herself in similar terms in November 1873: ‘As regards the English Church, which she perceives is being greatly threatened with disestablishment, action seems becoming necessary. This disestablishment the Queen would regret. She thinks a complete Reformation is what we want. But if that is impossible, the Archbishop should have the power given him, by Parliament, to stop all these Ritualistic practices, dressings, bowings, etc. And everything of that kind, and above all, all attempts at confession.’22

  In the year that the Queen came to the throne, the High and Low parties in the Church of England had differed over matters of doctrine, but in liturgical practice they would have been indistinguishable. John Henry Newman or John Keble, as leaders of the High Church faction in Oxford in the 1830s, would have worn the same simple surplices, for celebration of the Communion, as Low Churchmen, and preached in the same gown and bands. They had merely differed in ideas of what the Church was, and they would all have agreed that for them to adopt the Mass vestments of a Catholic priest would have been something like a sham. When, in 1845, Newman had decided that the logic of the High Church position led him to become a Roman Catholic, it had a shattering emotional effect on those he left behind, even though, in terms of numbers, very few actually followed him into communion with the Pope. (In the nineteenth century there were some 18,000 Church of England clergy of whom only a little more than 400 became Catholics.)

  But Newman’s conversion had, if anything, a greater effect on the Church of England than it had on the Catholic Church he joined. If today Church of England services have incense, vestments, devotions to the Blessed Virgin, and so forth, it is directly the consequence of Newman having left his Church (which in 1845 had none of these things) to join another. Some of Newman’s friends who stayed behind in the Church of England began to copy rituals and practices of the Catholics: Eucharistic vestments, rather than a simple surplice, to celebrate the Communion, candles – first two, then perhaps as many as six or more – on the holy table, and so forth. The custom of making a personal confession to a priest, which had always been an option in the Church of England, became more widespread. It was such practices as these which filled the Queen with alarm.

  Thwarted in her attempts to hold back Gladstone from his changes in Ireland, and impotent before Cardwell’s sweeping reforms of the military, she was determined to save the Church of England for the simple Protestant forms she had known in her girlhood. There was no hope of enlisting Gladstone to her cause. He was a High Churchman himself (though his High Churchmanship, which went back in time to the era before Newman’s conversion to Catholicism, was never especially ritualistic). Her dislike of Gladstone was not caused by his High Churchmanship, but the religious difference fuelled the dislike, and she no doubt echoed that great arbiter of theological opinion John Brown, who opined that Gladstone was ‘Half a Roman we canna have a worse lot’.23 Guided by the Calvinistic simpl
icities of John Brown, who loved the kirk at Crathie, Victoria developed a mania of hatred for the clergy in England who appeared, by their love of rituals and special liturgical clothing, to be aping Rome.

  Benjamin Disraeli was before all else a politician. When he became Prime Minister for the second time in February 1874, he knew that it would be impossible to satisfy the Queen by turning back army reform, or by solving the insoluble problems of Ireland. He did see, however, as no previous Prime Minister of her reign had done, the possibilities of uniting the monarchy and the idea of Empire in a truly fantastical manner. And in the meantime, before he pulled this particular rabbit out of his magician’s hat, Disraeli knew that the Church issue was one which could be passed through Parliament with apparent ease, and which would satisfy the Widow of Windsor. When he came to see all the complicated consequences of making it illegal to be High Church, Disraeli came to regret his decision. But, although in his way he was religious, church was never especially his kind of thing – unlike Gladstone who attended church every day of his life, often twice.

  By pure coincidence, Disraeli’s first, short premiership had coincided with five sees, including Canterbury and London, becoming vacant, and four deaneries. The Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley, was the man who advised the Queen about Church affairs, and pointed out to her that Gladstone ‘understood who were the distinguished men in each [Church] party much better’ than Disraeli. Indeed, on the second of only two visits to Balmoral, Disraeli desperately wrote to his private secretary and confidant Monty Corry, ‘Ecclesiastical affairs rage here. Send me Crockford’s directory; I must be armed.’24

  The High churches in Victorian England – that is, churches which burned candles on the holy table, or where the celebrant at Communion faced east, rather than standing at the north of the table – were small. A survey conducted in 1879 found that of the 864 churches in London, only 33 had clergy in vestments, and only 43 had candles. There were thirteen with incense, which was an irritant to Protestants, and probably far fewer had regular times when the congregation could go to Confession. Nevertheless, these ritualistic advances, within the body of the National Church, did cause outrage, not least because the higher, or Anglo-Catholic, churches tended to be in the poorer parts of cities where there were also Irish people. The Roman Catholics disliked the Anglicans imitating the Holy See. The simpler-minded near these High Church shrines possibly believed that the vicars actually were Roman Catholics, infiltrating their Protestant C of E. In some of the slum areas, where the ritualist priests worked so tirelessly, there was more rigorous opposition, for example from the local pimps and gin-shops, who felt their trade undermined by the clergy, who had great success in turning poor men, women and children to Christ. There were also the hard-line Protestants who came to make trouble. In and around the church of St George’s in the east in Wapping, for example, there had been riots from the late 1850s onwards. Crowds of over 1,000 protesters, most of them brought in from outside the parish, burst into the church. In spite of their leaders’ injunction – ‘Do not groan; do not hiss; do not pull the popish rags off his back’25 – the clergy were attacked physically, and there were attempts, in this parish and others, such as the newly formed slum-church of St Alban’s Holborn, to bring legal proceedings against them for such infringements of the canon law as standing to the east of the holy table.

  Queen Victoria, when she heard of these High Churches, was horrified to think that such practices could take place in her Church. In December 1873, she had written to Gladstone that, ‘The Queen has had conversations with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Winchester & other clergymen & all speak of alarm at the state of the Church – which the Archbishop thinks in great danger of being upset if things go on as they do now.’26

  The First Vatican Council had wound up in 1870, with Garibaldi arriving at the very gates of Rome, and the Pope being forced to give up his dominions and lands and all his temporal power. Pius IX had responded to this diminution in political power by the formal declaration of Himself to be Infallible. It was partly against this background that the Queen found the advancement, both of Roman Catholicism in England, and of High Church rituals within the Church of England, so alarming. She was ‘Protestant to the very heart’s core’, she said.27 She believed that a bishop ‘should have the power of checking practices which are most dangerous & objectionable & totally foreign to the spirit & former usages of the English Church’.28 If these views seem a little outré to some readers of the twenty-first century, it should be emphasized that Archbishop Tait endorsed them completely, and had for some years been presiding over a committee looking into ways in which the existing laws in ecclesiastical courts could be tightened, to prevent Protestant clergy from wearing ‘popish rags’. Although it was now thirty-five years since Roman Catholics had been allowed to sit as peers and MPs in the Commons, the Queen still felt misgivings about it: ‘she does object to the principle of treating them on an equality with the Protestants. The Government and many people in this country seem to the Queen to be totally blind to the alarming encroachments and increase of the R. Catholics in England and indeed all over the world. The Pope was never so powerful,’ she wrote to Lord Granville in 1869. It is a view which would have been interesting to the contemporaries of the great Hildebrand in the 1070s or to Dante, being punished with exile and the threat of death by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300. ‘The Queen is quite determined to do all in her power to prevent this. Every favour granted to the R. Catholics does not conciliate them, but leads them to be more & more grasping and encroaching & the danger of this to Protestant England cannot be over-rated.’29

  Therefore, when the more sympathetic figure of Disraeli came to power, he found that one of the first pieces of legislation which he was required to enact, to appease the religious prejudices of his sovereign, was the Public Worship Regulation Act. It was the last Act in which Parliament legislated for the Church without reference to Convocation,30 the Church’s own assembly of bishops and clergy. It was largely the inefficacy of the Act which led to the unravelling of parliamentary authority in Church affairs. (In 1882, 336 churches in England and Wales used vestments, and 2,158 churches did so 20 years later.31) Five clergymen were imprisoned as ‘Anglo-Catholic martyrs’, having committed what were now not merely infringements of canon law but of the Law of England – such esoteric offences as mixing a little water in the chalice of wine at Communion (as a symbol of the mingling of water and blood in the dying body of Christ) was now a matter for which a clergyman could come before the beak.

  As has been stated, this was a matter about which the senior clergy cared as deeply as did the Queen. But the passage of the Act – even though Disraeli came to rue it – was really a sign of the Queen’s lack of power, not a demonstration of her absolute control over her Prime Minister. Much was made at the time of the Queen’s crush on Disraeli, and of his shameless, camp, manipulation of this – his dubbing her ‘the Faery Queen’, her sending him primroses which she had discerned, possibly inaccurately, to be his favourite flower. What was actually going on politically was that Disraeli, that consummate wheeler-dealer, was harnessing the monarchy for the uses of popular, revivified Conservatism. By flattering the Faery Queen by allowing her to imprison a few clergymen in lace, he could get her in the mood for political work. Gladstone’s lack of charm met with everlasting royal stonewalling. Disraeli could see that the Queen, for all her caprices and whims, was, at heart, at one with the suburban Tory majority of England. But she did not know it until Disraeli showed it to be the case. Thus, at a stroke, he made the monarchy popular, and he used the monarchy to enhance and strengthen the Tory political position. The monarchy from the late 1870s became riotously more popular in Britain. Was it because the Royal Family became less quarrelsome, less scandal-prone, more charming, more given to public appearances and good works? No. It was because of the rise of popular Toryism.

  The Reform Act of 1867 had been a source of terror to
High Tories: for what if the big cities turned out to be populated by communists? Every election between 1867 and the First World War showed the opposite to be the case. True, there was a small, growing socialist movement, and Liberalism went on being a vibrant force. But the expansion of the franchise revealed also the huge extent of working-class Toryism, and the popular Toryism of the suburbs. Even Lord Salisbury came to see this, and it was the foundation on which that high aristocrat intellectual built his own power base, though he had to hold his nose before doing so.

  1867 had spelt the end, once and for all, not of the power of the political classes, but of the power of the monarchy. That is, in the sense that the monarch of Great Britain, whose power had been held in firm check one way or another since 1689, was now very definitely under the thumb of elected administrations. This was the fact to which both Gladstone and Disraeli were alive, and of which Victoria and her family were really only vaguely aware. Over seventy years ago, R. C. K. Ensor wrote an analysis of what had happened to the monarchy at this point, and his paragraphs remain unsurpassed: ‘A constitutional sovereign, while able to stand up against the ministers of an oligarchic parliament in the name of the unrepresented democracy, becomes powerless against men carrying the credentials of democracy itself.’32